On Thursday, the US Senate set aside its draft immigration reform bill, and will probably not take up immigration again for some time. This is a victory—any bill that offers illegal aliens a “path to citizenship” is a bad bill—but what accounts for it?

In a word: public pressure. Senators reported that 95 to 99 percent of their calls and letters opposed anything that smelled of amnesty. Without this tremendous pressure, the Senate would certainly have passed some form of “comprehensive immigration reform” that would have pushed us even further towards a Third-World future.

But this was hardly a shining example of democracy in action. No bill that meets with 95 to 99 percent voter opposition should even get out of committee. This one had considerable backing and failed on a procedural vote. Incurably idiotic Republicans kept jabbering to the very end about the importance of “reaching out” to Hispanics—Hispanics who will never give them anything but token support.

Moreover, the kind of public response that killed this bill may have the power to stop legislation, but is far too diffuse to start it. Americans have accomplished nothing positive with their millions of e-mail messages and telephone calls; they have merely prevented something awful. The whole purpose of the Senate bill was to legalize illegals, and it will take an entirely different constellation of interests to pass a law to get rid of them.

At the same time, if America is going to reverse rather than merely slow its plunge into Third-World status, voters will have to start saying something different about immigration. Americans want illegals turfed out, not rewarded with citizenship. So far, though, opposition to illegals has focused on the fact that they are illegal, not that they are unassimilable and can never adapt to our civilization.

The fury that Americans have worked up over illegal immigration is nevertheless an incipient form of racial consciousness. Liberal critics are right when they say there would be nothing like the present intensity of emotion if the illegals were Europeans, and supporters of immigration control are trying to fool someone—perhaps even themselves—when they deny it. Looming unmistakably in the background of the debate is the increasingly widespread realization that mestizos do not made good Americans, that Hispanic immigration has given us yet another crisis-ridden underclass to add to the black underclass we have had since the 1960s.

Average Americans may not understand the precise relevance of race in all of this, and they are reluctant to speak openly about it if they do, but the public clamor that defeated the Senate bill is an important sign that whites are learning to act in their own interests. As the referendum that eliminated racial preferences in Michigan showed—the people defied everyone: Democrats, Republicans and media schoolmarms—average Americans are way ahead of their rulers, and can thwart their rulers if they really exert themselves.

The defeat of the Senate bill is yet another example of the people defying their rulers. It is the role of American Renaissance and other race-realist organizations to focus the energy behind this defiance, to bring to the surface and encourage the healthy instincts that drive the opposition to massive Third-World immigration.

Although almost all whites feel it in their bones—just look where they live and where they send their children to school—only a few are prepared to say it clearly: America will cease to be America if whites become a minority and no longer enforce civilizational norms. It is only by speaking the truth as often and as reasonably as possible that a race-realist view will become an accepted part of the intellectual landscape.

A great deal of effort went into defeating the Senate bill, but would whites have made the same effort if they had not been able to make the easy argument about illegal immigration, but had been forced to explain why they did not want these illegals as fellow citizens? When it comes to deciding who will enter the country legally, can whites be counted on to act as vigorously as they have in opposition to illegal immigration? No, they cannot.

In derailing the Senate bill whites protected their own interests but it was largely a happy accident. They claimed—no doubt sincerely—to be acting out of respect for the law, and would have been reluctant to say they cared about what the bill meant for white people. This will have to change. Whites must understand much more clearly than they do now what is at stake, where their interests lie, and what threatens those interests. And they will have to be prepared to state those interests boldly and clearly rather than push for more “respectable” goals that only indirectly serve those interests.

We want to promote good laws, not just defeat bad ones. Only when enough whites have a clear sense of the necessity, inevitability, and legitimacy of their own racial interests will they be able to fight for them directly. Only then will they insist on immigration and citizenship policies that ensure for their children and grandchildren a civilized nation with a future rather than the Third-World pesthole our rulers are building for us.

The defeat of the Senate bill is an important beginning but it is only the beginning.